Britain plans its biggest policing shake-up in two centuries. Police Scotland shows why that might backfire
The Government's reforms diagnose real problems but prescribe a treatment with a troubling track record
Police Scotland was supposed to be the future. When Scotland merged its eight regional forces into a single national service in 2013, ministers promised efficiency savings, seamless coordination, and a crime-fighting machine fit for the digital age. Thirteen years on, that future looks rather different. The IT integration that was meant to save £200 million never materialised. Station closures severed ties with communities. Three chief constables have departed amid scandals. The force now employs 1,000 fewer officers than before.
Professor Megan O'Neill, a criminologist at the University of Dundee who has studied the merger extensively, puts it plainly: the restructure was "rushed through to such an extent that there were still problems of aligning systems 10 years later."
On Monday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans to attempt something similar south of the border—only larger and more ambitious. Her White Paper proposes consolidating England and Wales's 43 police forces into perhaps a dozen regional behemoths, creating a new National Police Service, abolishing elected Police and Crime Commissioners, and investing £115 million in artificial intelligence including 40 facial recognition vans. The Government calls this the most significant reform since Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Whether it proves to be progress or expensive folly depends entirely on lessons the Home Office appears reluctant to learn.
The case for change
The diagnosis, at least, is sound. Public confidence in British policing has slid from 79 per cent in 2015-16 to 67 per cent today. Victim satisfaction has collapsed—those "very satisfied" with police fell from 41 per cent to 23 per cent. The 43-force structure creates real absurdities: IT systems that cannot talk to each other, procurement duplicated 43 times over, small forces too stretched to maintain specialist units. Crime, meanwhile, has mutated. Fraud now comprises 44 per cent of recorded offences. Nine in ten crimes have a digital component. Criminals glide across borders; police remain stuck within them.
Gavin Stephens, Chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, endorsed the reforms with striking enthusiasm. "The postcode lottery of 43 police forces doing things 43 different ways," he declared, "is both inefficient and ineffective." Police chiefs have historically resisted merger talk—Charles Clarke's 2006 attempt collapsed under their opposition. That resistance has evaporated. The question is whether their newfound appetite for consolidation reflects wisdom or desperation.
What the NHS teaches us about mergers
Here the evidence should give pause. The NHS has been merging trusts for decades, generating a substantial body of research on what happens when public services consolidate. The findings are not encouraging.
Between 2010 and 2015, the Department of Health poured nearly £2 billion into supporting just 12 trust mergers—typically rescuing struggling organisations through acquisition by healthier neighbours. The results? University of Bristol researchers examined 102 acute hospital mergers and found productivity unchanged, waiting times increased, and financial deficits grown larger. Across all industries, studies consistently put merger failure rates between 70 and 90 per cent. Organisational cultures clash. Management attention shifts from delivery to restructuring. Promised synergies materialise late, or not at all. Staff morale collapses under upheaval they never chose.
"Successful mergers are the exception, not the rule," concluded the Health Service Journal. The King's Fund was blunter: mergers had become "a fashionable solution in search of a problem."
The White Paper waves this away, acknowledging Police Scotland's "teething issues" while arguing that technology has improved since 2013. This is optimism untethered from reality. England and Wales's 43 forces run incompatible IT systems, maintain different data standards, follow different processes—precisely the conditions that made Police Scotland's integration so agonising. Ministers promise an independent review of force structures, reporting this summer. But they have already committed to "significantly" fewer forces by the end of the next Parliament. The conclusion precedes the analysis.
The surveillance question
Nestled within the restructuring proposals is something else: an aggressive expansion of police surveillance that deserves its own scrutiny.
The White Paper commits £115 million over three years to artificial intelligence, including a new "Police.AI" centre and—most controversially—40 Live Facial Recognition vans to scan crowds in "high crime areas." The technology, ministers insist, will help "intercept violent and sexual offenders."
The timing is remarkable. Just weeks before the White Paper's publication, the National Physical Laboratory confirmed what civil liberties groups had long alleged: the facial recognition algorithm used by the Police National Database is racially biased, misidentifying Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men. Documents obtained by Liberty Investigates revealed something worse. Police had known about this bias since September 2024. When the National Police Chiefs' Council ordered the confidence threshold raised to reduce discrimination, forces complained the change made the technology operationally useless. The threshold was lowered again. Convenience trumped equality.
The Government promises a "bespoke legal framework" and a "public register" of AI tools. But a register is not oversight. Cambridge University researchers studying police facial recognition found UK forces "fail to meet legal and ethical standards," with scant transparency and no meaningful recourse for the wrongly identified. The European Union has heavily restricted police use of live facial recognition in public spaces. Britain, it seems, is heading in the opposite direction.
The accountability gap
This surveillance expansion becomes more troubling when set against another proposal: abolishing Police and Crime Commissioners.
PCCs were introduced in 2012 to provide direct democratic accountability—a single elected official responsible for holding chief constables to account. The model has underwhelmed. Turnout in PCC elections is dismal; public understanding of the role negligible. But the solution proposed is not to strengthen democratic oversight. It is to dilute it, replacing elected individuals with "Policing and Crime Boards" of mayors and council leaders.
Emily Spurrell, Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, warned this "risks severely weakening accountability at a time when we need to do more to build public trust." She has a point beyond institutional self-interest. The council leaders who would sit on these boards juggle dozens of responsibilities; policing becomes one agenda item among many. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary gains new powers to dismiss chief constables.
The pattern is worth noting. Surveillance capabilities expand. Democratic oversight contracts. Authority centralises in Westminster precisely as the tools of state scrutiny grow more powerful. This may be coincidence. It does not feel like one.
The neighbourhood promise
Sensing voter anxiety about centralisation, the Government has draped its reforms in the language of community policing. The White Paper promises 13,000 additional neighbourhood officers by the end of this Parliament, named officers for every ward, and 72-hour response times to neighbourhood queries.
These are worthy ambitions. They also sit uneasily with merging forces into regional giants. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp voiced the obvious concern in Parliament: "Such huge forces will be remote from the communities they serve. Resources will be drawn away from villages and towns towards large cities." Hertfordshire PCC Jonathan Ash-Edwards was plainer: "Regional forces will see resources pulled into cities and big urban centres, leaving towns and rural areas with scraps."
History suggests they are right to worry. When Greater Manchester Police centralised a decade ago, improving neighbourhood policing required the opposite move—creating smaller local hubs and pushing decisions closer to communities. Police Scotland's trajectory was grimmer still: station closures and centralised call-handling severed exactly the local connections that community policing depends upon. The White Paper insists this time will be different. It offers no convincing reason why.
The real question
The Police Federation's response cut to the heart of it. "Policing is broken and is breaking the officers who give everything to keep their communities safe," said National Chair Tiff Lynch. "Fewer forces alone will not guarantee better policing. Skills, capabilities and equipment all need big investment."
This is the right frame. No serious observer doubts British policing needs reform. The question is whether this reform will work—and whether its costs and risks are justified by plausible benefits. Evidence from Police Scotland, from NHS trust mergers, from organisational research across sectors suggests consolidation is a treatment that frequently fails and sometimes makes patients worse.
The White Paper contains sensible ideas: national data standards, shared procurement, clearer performance accountability. None of these requires merger. They require mandated collaboration with enforcement mechanisms—precisely what a National Police Service could deliver through standard-setting powers, without the disruption and expense of wholesale restructuring.
Professor O'Neill, drawing on Scotland's hard experience, offers a final warning. The Scottish merger was "rushed through to such an extent that there were still problems of aligning systems 10 years later." The Government promises eight years for its reforms. Whether that proves enough time, or whether future ministers will spend years unpicking this week's ambitious plans, remains to be seen.
What is clear is this: the largest policing reform in two centuries deserves more than faith in the curative powers of consolidation. It deserves evidence that the treatment outperforms alternatives. That evidence, so far, the Government has not supplied.